By Emily D. Crews, University of Alabama
In my previous posts, I’ve written about two practical tools, storytelling and images, that have enlivened and improved my teaching. In this post, I want to share an equally effective but somewhat less tangible tool: intimacy. I’ll go over what I mean when I use the term “intimacy,” some tips for how to create an intimate classroom environment, and how intimacy continues to be relevant and possible in the current moment of remote teaching during social distancing.
What Is Intimacy?
Intimacy might be most commonly defined as a feeling of closeness or familiarity. That definition certainly obtains for my philosophy of teaching, but what I have in mind when I use the term is somewhat more elaborate. My concept is informed by the work of scholars like Peter Geschiere and Constance Furey, who understand intimacy to be a malleable, productive type of relationality that brings about changes in the ways that subjects and objects of relationships view themselves and one another. Put more plainly, growing close to another person (or an idea or a space or a state of being) has the potential to change way that we think about ourselves, that other person (or idea or space or state of being), and the entire world around us.
In the context of a college classroom, intimacy has the power to inspire transformative reflection—about ourselves, about society, and about the things we hold as true or right or valuable. When we feel close to ourselves and the other members of a learning community, when we feel like we’ve come to know them in a way that goes beyond the surface, we are able to think and question in ways that might otherwise have evaded us. Intimacy makes it possible for us to build trust with one another, to be vulnerable, to take risks, and to think in creative, innovative ways. This is particularly valuable in a Religious Studies classroom, where our object of study is, for many students, a deeply personal, private, and sensitive topic of which they might feel protective or defensive. Discussions of religion can be suffused with claims and assumptions that require both delicacy and critical dismantling, and intimate intellectual environments can serve as ideal venues for that process.
Students from one of my Intro classes working on a collaborative project.
How to affect intimacy in a classroom
1: Be explicit about your attempts to build a community. I am very open with my students about my goal of creating an intimate classroom environment in which we’re able to trust and rely on one another. I typically acknowledge that, while it’s a bit cheesy, I do truly think that the most powerful learning takes place in community and that each member of our class will be a crucial part of bringing that community into being. I also include a paragraph about that goal on my syllabus.
2: Have students work in pairs and groups. An obvious but effective way to get to know someone is to spend time with that person and to share your thoughts, ideas, and experiences. One of the best means of achieving that in a class setting is to have your students work closely with one another. Over the course of the semester, I have my students work together in various permutations—sometimes in pairs, sometimes in small groups, and sometimes in larger (5 or 6) person teams. This gives them insight into each others’ ways of thinking and analyzing that they might not get in a standard seminar format.[1] In my two years at the University of Alabama (Roll Tide!), students have routinely reported that they were surprised by how much they enjoyed working in groups in our class and how much they learned by collaborating with their peers.
Group work can be done in a number of fun and effective ways. I’ve found that there are a few that are especially productive in my classes.
a: Pair up students at the beginning of class and have them briefly discuss a few guiding questions about the day’s readings. This not only helps to give them an opportunity to prepare for the general class discussion that’s to come, it also gives them a chance to speak one on one with a peer and to see the unique ways that person might engage the course material.
b: Assign group projects. In my class I’ve assigned a variety of projects in which students are required to work together to prepare a debate, fill our worksheets or play games, or create a video or a slideshow or some kind of project that pools their knowledge and creative skills. This includes a final project that they present at the end of the semester. For the final, I typically put students into their project groups (which I select) early on in the semester and have them work on several small exercises so they have an opportunity to get to know one another before they begin work on the major project.
c: Consider offering the option of a group exam. I generally allow my students input on the kind of assessment I give. This semester all three of my Intro classes settled on an oral midterm exam they would take in groups of 5. Of their own accord, they got together to study and prepare and came to their exam sessions with impressive energy and understanding of the material. In our debrief, the students overwhelmingly reported that the group exam lowered their anxiety about taking a test while also making them feel more engaged with the material (because they wanted to perform well for their peers) and more supported (because they knew they could rely on their teammates).
3: Create opportunities for students to reflect on and share their thoughts and opinions. A central goal of my teaching is to have students uncover and then question their (often subconscious) assumptions about what religion is or should be, and to see how those have been shaped and naturalized by forces outside themselves. I want them to reckon with questions of universality and particularity, emic and etic, inclusion and exclusion in order to make informed decisions about the classifications that animate their lives. I eventually want my students to treat themselves as the data of our course as much as (and in reality, far more than) they treat texts we read or the “religions” we discuss.
In order to get them to make these connections, I try to create regular opportunities for students to consciously reflect on and share their ideas. I use free writes, guided journaling, open-ended discussion, and collaborative exercises that invite students to move away from simply recounting what they’ve read to sharing their own thoughts, ideas, and experiences. My hope is that this helped them to engender intimacy not only with one another, but with themselves.
4: Practice vulnerability. I’ve found that a crucial part of creating intimacy with and amongst my students is for me to actively practice being vulnerable in the way that I hope they will be. While I maintain a fairly firm boundary between my personal and professional lives—I rarely talk about my home life in my classes or invite students to be overly confessional about the details of their private lives—I do share personal intellectual reflections or revelations.
For instance, this semester when learning about Otto’s definition of religion we discussed the importance he placed on feelings of awe and mystery in the face of something that is both compelling and repelling. When I asked students what kinds of things they could think of that make them feel that sort of simultaneous push and pull (they often say car accidents and sports injuries), I told them about my first experience looking through a telescope in my astronomy class in college. I described how when I saw the stars—when I really saw them, seemingly so close and yet so far away, practically ageless in comparison to my miniscule human life—I felt disoriented and sick, like I’d stepped onto land after years at sea. I was forced to confront the reality of my own finitude and relative insignificance in a way I never had before, and it left a profound impact on me. (At this point some of them also looked sick, some of them thought I was being funny, and some of them just outright laughed at me when I shouted, “But don’t think about mortality now! Just don’t do it! It never goes anywhere good!”). While sharing this story with students didn’t require that I divulge anything we might think of as particularly private, it was an act of vulnerability to talk to them about something as all-encompassing and uniquely destabilizing as a recognition of my own mortality.
I also try to be frank in acknowledging my limitations in certain moments (a skill I’m very much still learning and which Greg Chatterly so beautifully performed in his most recent post), to be honest when I don’t know something, and to admit when I’m wrong or something we’re trying in class isn’t working. These kinds of vulnerabilities are powerful when they’re expressed openly and they encourage students to realize that they can also accept (and even come to like) the fact that they’re imperfect.
5: Laugh at yourself (and invite your students to join in). Laughter is a remarkably powerful tool in a classroom. When I make fun of myself when I misspell something on the board (which is at least once a week) or forget what I was saying (which is at least once a class) or get my words tangled (which is at least once a minute) my students see that I don’t take myself too seriously and that I don’t expect them to be perfect, either. The distance between student and instructor can be closed or at least diminished by our active erosion of our authority and our willingness to remove ourselves from the safety of such positions. Sharing a joke with students, even at our own expensive, connects us all to each other in a way that potentially lays the groundwork for future closeness and collaboration.
Teaching with Intimacy in the Time of COVID-19: An Addendum
When I first envisioned writing this post, the kind of classroom environment I had in mind is the one in which I was then teaching—four walls, some windows, 25 students sitting next to one another and in front of me for two mornings a week. Since then, the way I teach has changed dramatically, as it has for essentially all teachers who’ve shifted from an in person classroom to a digital one. Those 25 students are now spread out all over the country and I’m stuck in my house in Tuscaloosa wearing yoga pants and a 20 year old sweater, talking about definitions and classification and the myth of universality across a massive digital divide.
In this kind of moment, when we’re all so far apart and so isolated, and when our work has been necessarily driven to these extremes, writing about intimacy might seem a little tone deaf. How are we supposed to create intimacy in an online class? How can we be vulnerable and work in groups and laugh at ourselves when so many of us already feel untenably vulnerable and when laughter might feel inappropriate, if not impossible?
Maybe intimacy isn’t a realistic goal for now. Maybe the best we can do in this moment is keep ourselves safe and healthy and sometimes put on clean socks and make our kids some snacks. Maybe crafting our classes into warm intellectual environments is something we can save for when/if-the-hell-ever we all go back to teaching and learning face to face.
But maybe now is exactly the time to at least be thinking about what it might mean to use intimacy as a tool for transformative learning. Now, when we haven’t seen each other for weeks (or months or years), when the distance between us and our students is so great, when we are effectively estranged from much of what we took for granted, perhaps intimacy becomes especially worth considering. Now, when we understand so, well, intimately what it means to be deprived of closeness.
I would argue that intimacy hasn’t lost its significance or its relevance for us as teachers or students, in spite of the shift to online teaching many of us are currently experiencing. In fact, it’s possible that it’s never been more important. As students are deprived of their connections to much of what has thus far defined their experiences in college, as they seek answers to questions they never imagined they’d have to ask themselves, the opportunity to connect with their teachers and fellow students can be truly transformative. So the next time you email or Zoom or FaceTime or Houseparty with a student, consider asking them what they’re thinking about this strange moment in their life. Or share a reflection of your own. Or maybe just laugh at yourself and call it a day.
[1] If you ask 100 college students what they think about working in groups, approximately 98 of them will say they hate it. When I’ve polled my students about such reasoning, most have reported that they feel like they end up doing the majority of the group’s work or that they don’t like having their grade affected by anyone else. My sense is that most of these issues are mitigated when teachers work closely and check in often with each group and when the expectations for the project and for working in groups are made very clear. I also ask each student to grade all the other members in their group at the end of the project. This helps to keep each student accountable for their own participation.
The Craft of Teaching in the Academic Study of Religion 